not die in London, it was mainly because my holidays were of a very different description.  I never visited but one watering-place, and that was enough.  I never stayed in a boarding-house in my life, nor would the promise of all my expenses paid and a handsome bonus into the bargain tempt me to the experiment.  I sought the country absolute; a cottage or a little farm remote from towns and out of sound of railways; villages so tiny that maps refuse to name them.  I can count half a dozen of these places which haunt my memory with all the sanctity of some religious dream.  They were my temporary cloisters, where I received the sacrament of silence; the woodland sanctuaries where my spirit was renewed.  When my friends returned from Margate they were full of chatter about the people that they had met, and they went about whistling the last song they had heard upon the beach.  I had met no one but a few simple labouring folk, and the music I remembered was the whistling of blackbirds and thrushes in the early dawn.  I knew that I had purchased much finer pleasure in a single day, and at a cheaper rate, than they in a month of days; but I never told them so, for they would not have understood me.  The ear that hungers for the raucous strains of cockney Pierrots on a beach cannot attune itself to the notes of the morning thrush.

There is one tiny farm that I love to think of, because its tenants taught me better than a thousand books could have done how real was the felicity of simple life.  It had six rooms all told, and was little better than a cottage.  Before its door ran a clear river which connected two lakes; a pinewood rose behind the house, and behind this again the lower buttresses of the everlasting hills.  The nearest town was seven miles away; you reached it by a lovely road, in part through pinewoods, in part over open moors, with the silver flashing of a lake never far away, and the purple mountains always close at hand.  The farm-holding was insignificantly small, as was the case in those parts; but my host uttered no word of its insufficiency.  He grew enough oats to provide good oatmeal for his family and fodder for his horse; his potatoes also came from his own soil, and his bacon from his own stye; his few sheep gave him fresh meat, or brought him a little money in the market, and from their wool every blanket in the house was spun, and even his own clothing woven.  Two cows provided milk and butter for the household; his fowls gave him eggs and occasionally a dinner; and thus with the exception of the yearly grocer’s bill he spent next to no money.  I dwelt beneath this humble roof for a month, and I profess that in all that time I never saw the members of the household engaged in any labour that was not also a pleasure.  There was plenty of work, of course:  cows to be milked, vegetables to be dug and cleansed, meals to be prepared, the little harvest to be gathered in; but it was work that one could do with singing.  No one hurried over it, for there was ample time for every duty of the day.  No one felt these simple duties burdensome, because they were so natural and inevitable, It was a rare day when some member of the household did not find an hour or two for fishing, and a disappointing breakfast that did not show a lordly dish of trout.